7. Caspian

CHAPTER 7

Caspian

B oring walls. Empty halls. Paint splotches on canvas with no meaning. The first time was a novelty. I could forgive her, then, for her reaction. So awestruck. She's seen little outside of her stone prison. Of course, the mortal world impressed her, shiny and new.

By now, the sparkle has worn off, the shine dulled. She should inspect these artworks with a sigh and smother yawn into the pale hand that flies to her mouth. Then we will go to the portal and she can leave here content for now. During her pursuit of Night Aurelia, I will hunt Cassius down. We will be free.

All in all, she should beg me to take her from this place now .

Not gasp. Another wide-eyed expression shapes those plain features of hers, giving them light. Depth. Dimension-- words that suddenly take on a whole new meaning in this fucking fractured brain. You could sculpt those cheeks with charcoal and soot, but it would take decades of color matching to depict those eyes. The darkness in them. The worry, the pain, the fear and the hope.

Her hope is stifling. I see it, glimpse it, taste it and it breeds a festering ache within me. Something too dangerous to linger upon.

In my mind, she is a viper, and I feel an instinctive need to push her away. Shove her if I have to. Off a cliff if I must.

She is dangerous to me.

She makes me remember…

Things I don't want to.

Like…

How rain smells on damp skin. What blood tastes like—long before the taste of it grew to sate me. When it was bitter on the tongue. When I had to wade through gallons of it. Once upon a time. Sometime in the distant past. Or the future?

Can't tell. Can't remember.

The air has changed in here. In these dank, dusty hallways lined with skeptical mortals and prowling guards. They don't seem to pick up on the change. Don't notice what their little eyes and dull senses can't acknowledge.

I can feel it. Sense it.

The darkness unfurling in this sprawling space. There is evil here. A malicious entity.

I should leave now. Seek only to protect my fae. Reaching out my hand towards her pale form, I approach her. Her attention is focused on another painting, oblivious to everything else around her.

Like the damned smell. Sulfur and ink. Dust and mustiness. An itchy, crawling, choking, goddamned familiar scent. It calls to me. It lures me away from her, through a crowd of aimless mortals and deeper into this rickety, rotting, old building.

Despite the pretty veneer, this place is much older than it appears. Its very foundation stinks of centuries of mortal filth. I sniff, hating the stench of it. Old paint. Older dust. Decades and centuries of mortal odors caked into the walls.

But one scent does not belong.

It is familiar. Too familiar. It draws me deeper, down a set of stairs and into a rarely used corridor. The scent of neglect and decay is thicker down here. So heavy I want to choke.

Still, I'm propelled forward, closer. Relentlessly drawn toward the source of the odor.

A painting: a series of them in a tiny little display festooned with a sign I don't bother to read. There are twelve of them, displayed in a neat little row. Ugly little visions of things. Nothing like the jaunty, happy portraits upstairs.

These are the demented figments of a very disturbed mind.

A familiar mind…

How?

I try to remember. For once, I want to remember. What sick mind created these visions, so unlike the other mortal-made images?

A twisted soul.

With globs of oil and pigment, they depicted vile things that remind me of Cassius. Pale creatures reminiscent of my fae.

Moreover, they depicted this world as burning.

All of it burning.

And she, my Niamh, stands at the center of the destruction, dark eyes blazing, fixed straight ahead, glaring at me through space and time.

I failed her and she hates me.

It's me she's burning.

Me she's trying to kill.